Horror - Short
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs. No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
All rights reserved. The Newel Post Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026
THE NEWEL POST
The craftsmanship was fine enough for a casket. Hidden beneath thick dust and stringy flea market cobwebs, the newel post became all that Samantha Tremblay saw. She had to have it.
A newel post, a totem to announce a staircase.
It had a small nubbin top above a bulbous tapering growth of Middle Eastern rhythm that budded up to the ovular column before falling into nine concentric rings, thirteen evenly spaced dots, and a second, smaller bulbous growth that tapered down toward a sharp rectangular base.
While playing hockey in the foyer, Ella and Jane had chipped and cracked the current post, rendering it ugly, inadequate. The Coyote House bed and breakfast had felt off since.
Samantha began the hunt weeks earlier. Flea markets, online browsing, consideration of stock designs from a company out of Hannover, Germany, and now, finally, she had perfection.
She needed to set the house rules anew. “Hey, listen to me.” Samantha leered face-to-faces with her daughters, both fourteen. “No more hockey in here or I’ll beat you blind.”
The twins rolled twin sets of eyes.
Their mother was all bluster. Their father was even softer, unless it cut into his gardening time. An assistant manager of a B&B in Prescott, Arizona had a great deal of gardening to see to.
Samantha was the opposite. She spent the majority of her days dealing with the major interior operations, including the cleaning, the books, and the furnishings, leaving the rest to the girls and Nathan.
The hired carpenter was a quick hand, slowing only momentarily to deal with a sliver needled beneath his right index fingernail. “That’s it,” he said, popping the injured digit into his mouth.
Samantha lifted one eyebrow and downturned the other. The post was filthy with laborer prints. Sticking it home and fastening the banister and step was hardly it. She washed, dried, waxed, and then buffed until shoeshine fine.
“Come, come,” she called out the open window behind the reception desk to her husband, Nathan, in the backyard digging at Bermuda grass invading the stone pathway.
Nathan came around, dusty as The Grapes of Wrath. “Hey, looks good. Maybe better than the old one.”
“Maybe? It’s perfect.”
“If you say so.”
“Think beyond function for once. I mean look at it.” Samantha ran fingers over a smooth curve.
“Okay, it’s nice.”
“Fine. You’ve got dirt all over the carpet.”
“Ella’s night to vacuum.” Nathan looked up.
“What? No,” Ella said.
Jane was behind Ella standing beneath the mounted deer antlers at the top of the stairs. Both wore yoga capris and their house slippers—mom’s rule on the footwear. “Can’t flake this time. I ain’t covering again.”
“When have you ever—?” Jane wrapped her arm over Ella’s neck, headlock hold, muffling her words.
“Shut up, both of you,” Samantha said.
Footfalls stomped downwards as the girls bickered. Nathan added nothing, headed to the door he’d left yawning. It wasn’t until slippers came into view that Samantha shifted her focus from the newel post.
Thump. Clap.
The initial sound was dull. The smacking of skin on skin when a cheek met a forearm was much louder.
“Jane,” Nathan said.
“You bitch!” Ella shouted from the floor, her lip bleeding and expanding.
Jane’s expression was a mixture of angst and confusion. “I didn’t do nothing!”
“You tripped me! My lip, you goddamned bitch!”
Nathan reached the fallen daughter’s side and assisted her to her feet. Samantha stood dumbfounded as Jane. Jane’s feet had been nowhere near her sister when Ella tumbled.
As punishment, Jane maneuvered the vacuum cleaner through the six-room Victorian, the toll for a crime she did not commit. Samantha had wanted to argue the right case, but quickly came to an obvious conclusion and remained quiet. It was a push and not a trip. Jane had done it. Who else?
“Coming to bed?” Nathan called from the upstairs hall.
Samantha ran her fingers over the post. “Yes, yes.” Power trickled a charge, bringing with it an intense after-buzz.
“It’s just a post, dear.”
Samantha mouthed the words just a post, dear, upper lip in a fine crinkle. “You’re more than that, aren’t you? You’re my post,” she whispered.
Under the sheets, Nathan asked Samantha if the two guests in the main floor bedroom had any special requests for breakfast. She said they did not. He asked if it was still just the additional couple for the weekend. She said there was a second couple that had booked about an hour after supper. He then asked what to do about the girls. To this, she had no answer.
Samantha dreamed of a lake full of logs. She pointed to a forty-footer in a row of forty-footers, bark shining and dark in the blue water. “That one.”
A bulky lumberjack in green plaid and yellow suspenders nodded and ran atop the floating logs to retrieve the chosen piece. He hefted it in classic caber toss form and flung it to the shore where it landed next to Samantha.
No longer a rough log, now the wonderful newel post. Samantha leaned to looked closer.
The lumberjack was beside her. “Summin’ wrong with that’un.”
Aghast, Samantha turned to face the sun shining through the bedroom window, letting the dream slip away. She flipped over to see the clock and then jerked up. After ten.
She showered, dressed, tied her hair into a ponytail, and hurried down the stairs. It was a summer Thursday, the girls had soccer, meaning nobody had the phones or the email manned. Customers are finicky and if nobody answerer…
Samantha face planted. It took five seconds to understand.
She’d tripped, both feet flung, as if striking a barrier simultaneously. The phone rang and she sprang for the desk.
“Coyote House, Samantha speaking, how can I help you?” Her voice was rushed and her wind short.
“Hey, just me. Ella’s tumble did a little more tweaking than we figured and now she twisted it worse at practise.”
Samantha turned off the front desk charm. “So, what?”
“We’re late. We stopped by the pharmacy to get a tensor bandage We can’t have her sitting out the tournament. That carpenter was there. His hand was enormous. Said that damned post must got wormwood in it or some such thing.”
“Wormwood, right. Idiot. So, how late?”
“Hour yet. Getting burgers and ice cream, you want any?”
She didn’t, told him so, and disconnected. “Wormwood,” she said, stepping around the desk, thinking of her tumble and Ella’s tumble. She ran fingers over the rug. Smooth. She prodded the firm edges of the stairs. Sharp. She turned to the banister where it connected to the post and had the overwhelming urge to lick it.
So she did.
It tasted like wax, but sent a vibration that had her legs off in a hurry, to the master bathroom, to the shoebox behind the second string towels where she’d hidden certain objects that she pretended not to own.
—
“Why you so smiley?” Ella asked, limping as she stepped through the door.
Nathan and Jane followed and behind them was a white-haired man. Samantha ignored Ella and the blush creeping up her neck. She said to the man, “Welcome to Coyote House.”
“I’m a day early, any chance you’ve got room now?”
“Oh, we can likely work something out. Name?”
Samantha filled out the necessary information, slid the credit card through the reader, and fetched a key to Four. She led the man upstairs and explained supper while they walked, and when he said he was going to meet a friend downtown, she asked about the second guest he’d mentioned in booking.
“That’s the one I’m meeting. I don’t mean to be a randy fool, but I’m hoping to bring her back with me tonight. She’s only fifty-nine.” He grinned, hands in his pockets, swaying on his heels, thrusting his groin gently.
Life experience taught Samantha how to ignore the suggestive motion. “I hope that works out. Front door locks at eleven.”
“She might have her own ideas, so don’t wait up.” He winked and Samantha turned before rolling her eyes in the very manner that she’d inadvertently taught her daughters to do.
As a family, the Tremblays watched TV while digging into bowls of chili. Samantha kept an ear to the foyer in case someone walked in, called, or emerged from a room itching to ring the silver service bell.
There was a thump followed by a light groan. Samantha rose and departed the familial space unnoticed, bowl of chili in hand. When she saw the old man attempting to right himself, she set her supper on the desk and rushed to his side.
He laughed. “Lost my feet. Don’t worry, made it most of the way down before I spilled.”
“You tripped?”
“That I did, on that last step.”
The old man did not stick around. Trip or no trip, he had a hot date. Samantha returned to her chili, took two steps toward the family room before turning around. Something was going on. Bowl on the carpet next to her, she examined the staircase. There were scratches in the wood where the post and the riser and lip of the first step met.
Reluctant to touch the post, it felt almost like cheating.
“Idiot,” she whispered, knowing that when under the microscope of logic, her desire was nothing more than taking advantage of an empty home. She grabbed onto the post. Nothing surged at her core or loins, but there was a tickle, and it was different from before.
She pushed the post. Firm. It did not wiggle. She shook it. Nothing.
“Those scratches didn’t come from nowhere.”
The carpenter had screwed up. She’d call him after supper.
—
“Damned thing.” The carpenter’s voice had been low before, but at the mention of the newel post, his tone became a snake’s hiss. “What now?”
“It’s loose somehow, somewhere. You need to fix your work.”
“Come back?” Samantha could almost hear the man’s eyebrows raise with his voice. “You want…? All right. Give me an hour.”
Right then it made all the sense in the universe that tripping had become a regular hazard. She’d employed an idiot.
“Wormwood, pfft.”
Forty minutes later, nose deep in a Kinsey Millhone, Samantha sat behind the front desk. The carpenter swung the door inward. His pallor was almost green. He was gaunt. A goodly stubble grew over his jaw, proving that it had been five o’clock a few times over. He carried a duffle bag in his left hand. Cotton bandage with oily splotches covered his right.
“I’ll just get to it then,” he said, eyeing the post as he kicked the door closed behind him.
Samantha nodded and looked to the book. Swirling, the letters jumbled into alphabet soup, leaving only two discernable words standing on the messy page: SAVE ME.
Quiet, unquestioning, she slipped the bookmark home and rose from the chair. She shuffled on the carpet in rubber-soled slippers over to the half-wall that split the office and staircase.
“Think I’d let you in me and you’d get away with it?”
Samantha jerked at hearing the whispered oddity and then pressed tighter to hear more.
“Might poison my skin, but I’m taking my dreams back.”
It was only a second after the unzipping of the bag that Samantha saw the red head of a hatchet arc back from around the wall. Without hesitation, she leapt, words leaving her mouth like a cough. “My post!”
The carpenter was in no shape for a tussle and the hatchet, as well as the gooey bandage, came away from his hands. He slumped, tears springing. “It’s evil. You got to kill it.”
“Sir, you’re…” her words trailed as she drank in the pitted gore of the man’s index finger. It was puffy and yellow, tunnels like caterpillar holes in apple cores traversing the putrid flesh. She dropped the hatchet. The bandage clung to her palm, adhering with viscous pus glue. She swatted and wiped against her jeans until the bandage rolled and fell to the carpet. “You’re crazy.”
The carpenter tugged at his shirt. “Crazy? Crazy?” Two buttons popped and two more lost hold of their eyes, revealing a chest of thin grey hair and a series of yellowy dots like bleached ink stains. “Look. They come at night. More and more. They come at night in my dreams and I wake up and there’s more.”
Nathan entered the foyer, as did the guests staying in Two.
“Call the ambulance,” Samantha said to Nathan.
The hospital was two miles away, only a four-minute wait. The big carpenter cried, slouched against a wall, eyes firm on the post until the paramedics took him away.
In bed, Nathan asked what Samantha thought the carpenter meant by dreams of the post. She said she had no idea. He pressed on, explaining that he’d also dreamed of the post, and a fire, and two crispy daughters alongside a crispy wife.
“Really?” she said, recalling then only the tiniest bits of a lumberjack.
“Bad Juju in the air. Halloween dreaming months early.”
“Stress maybe. You check the smoke detectors recently?”
“They’re all working. I tested them first thing, had to after a dream like that.”
She rolled over, surprised the testing hadn’t woken her.
She slept lightly. Fantastical flashes came and went. Through the closed door and out in the hall, a noise pulled her halfway from dreamland.
Thump.
She did not open her eyes, fighting to fall back into respite’s abyss.
Thump. Thump.
The door creaked and her mind answered enough questions to allow her eyes to remain closed. Nathan had gotten up, surely.
Thump.
The bed moved.
Something brushed her legs, sending a warm pulse, and she half-rolled, separating her thighs. “Not now,” she said, closing her legs and completing the roll.
Thump.
The sound was going away, and if it had landed again, she’d slept through it.
—
“Mom!” Jane shook Samantha.
She opened her eyes to the mid-morning shine and a frantic daughter. “What?”
“Nothing, just saying bye!” Ella shouted from the other side of the bed. Excited soccer players.
Injured and pristine, the twins had the out-of-town tournament that could last up to three days, depending on final scores.
“Oh, and two different guests called to cancel and the people in Two left after breakfast.” Jane led the way out of the room and down the stairs.
Money was always better with more guests, but flying solo for a couple days meant there was more work for her. One of those mixed blessings.
It was only the man with the date left and he hadn’t yet returned. Samantha did as she always had, but the silence let her mind wander. The thumping up the stairs came at her and she tried to imagine Nathan getting out of bed to take the stairs, only to come up, and then…
Part my thighs.
That can’t be right.
It was dark. She sat reading, having finished the Grafton, she’d moved onto an Amy Lukavics. The door opened and the old man stumbled in, drunk. “I still got it,” he said, stupid, half-conked gaze pouring out beneath liquor-lidded eyes. He took two steps forward, one sideways, a half step back, then another forward. “I need’a sleep.”
Ass. She helped the man up to his room where he began stripping long before she closed the door. Down the stairs, she looked at the post, lowered to a crouch, and touched new grooves in the base. It made her want to take a hatchet to the carpenter himself.
Instead she rose, turned the deadbolt, got a glass of water, and went to bed.
At three in the morning, Samantha awoke to sounds coming up the staircase. Her eyes opened wide as she listened, assuming soon the door would creak open as it had the night before.
“Nathan?” she whispered, knowing it wasn’t him.
Thump. Thump.
The sound drew closer and she imagined static charges.
Thump.
Closer yet. Reality clicked.
Thump.
“Can’t be. Can’t be.” Her words came out on a hiss. She grabbed for Nathan’s pillow. “Impossible.”
Thump.
Further away. Her heart hummed a drum-roll pace nonetheless.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Down the hall. Samantha exhaled a grateful breath before gasping it right back in as screaming filled the air. “God! God! Jesus! God!”
It was the old man, his voice less drunk. A door banged open and quiet footfalls raced. Samantha listened, knowing the terrain so well that she actually saw the scene unfolding. The man squealed. A pounding returned, but different.
Thumpthump.
Falling, the man made windy noises until the first snap.
Thumpthumpthump.
Samantha launched from bed and crashed through the door. She ran to the banister at the open face of the hallway to look down on the foyer. The old man was in white boxer shorts and a white undershirt. Urine darkened the carpet beneath him. Wet brown splotches decorated the ass of his shorts. His right ear pressed tight against his right shoulder, tendons and bones bunching out at horrid angles beneath the loose neck flesh.
She had to call the police. She ran to the far end of the hallway where the visitor line sat, as there were to be no phones in the master bedroom—Dad’s rule on work-home balance. She picked up the handset.
It was four minutes before the police arrived. Two big men, each carried a Starbucks cup. They asked a series of questions before one branched off to talk on his cellphone beyond earshot.
“You heard thumping?”
“Someone must’ve come in. Someone else,” Samantha said to the cop who’d stayed in the foyer. “I heard them on the stairs. Heavy steps.” Not steps, not steps at all! Thumps.
“Heavy steps, huh?”
The other cop returned with his pad in hand. “I called the security company. You engaged the lock and the system at nine-oh-two. It did not disengage until you opened it, assumedly for the ambulance at three-ten. Nobody in or out.”
“I heard thumps on the stairs,” Samantha said.
“Thumps?”
“Steps.”
Four eyes narrowed. The first cop said, “Now, answer me this, how is it we have a raving man at the hospital commit suicide, talking about your B&B, on the same night we find a mangled man with a huge, odd bruise on the top of his head in the foyer of the same B&B?”
Samantha cast a look back at the post and the stairs. More scratches, as if the thing had moved. The words it was the post nearly left her lips. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Inconvenient,” the second cop said.
They left shortly after paramedics rolled the body out, but promised to be close by, should she recall anything. She considered calling Nathan, but decided against it. It was late and there was nothing he could do.
She looked at the newel post.
A wide berth wasn’t really possible. Samantha pressed her back to the wall as she climbed the stairs. Her gaze flashed from the stains to the scratches to the mounted antlers on the wall at the head of the staircase. Once to the top, she broke for her bedroom.
—
The clock face wasn’t playing nice. Samantha flipped and flopped as those minute digits rose at an impossibly slow pace. At 5:49 AM, she drifted away, dreaming a voice that howled, SAVE ME, SAVE ME, SAVE ME.
At 5:59 AM, she awoke.
Thump.
She sat up.
Thump.
“No.”
Thump.
She leapt from bed as if on replay and ran for the phone in the hallway, not daring to look for what she suspected to find on the staircase. Somehow.
She picked up the receiver but put it down immediately. First the carpenter and then the man. The cops loved to pin the tail on whichever donkey came easiest. This was insane, the post couldn’t…
Thump.
“They already think it’s me, but it’s the post! It’s. My—The. Post.” The phone came away from its cradle again. It didn’t matter what they thought—SAVE ME—there was no proof that she’d done anything because she hadn’t done anything. “I didn’t,” she said, loud enough that she might convince herself of it. Had she let the carpenter work with the hatchet, much of this wouldn’t have happened. Everyone would be alive, maybe.
Thump.
The line rang twice before the 911 operator picked up. Samantha explained the rational bits. The operator kept a level, reassuring tone, adding, “Stay on until the police arrive.”
Thump.
Samantha turned to face the sound at the staircase.
Thump.
“Ma’am, are you…”
Thumpthumpthump.
“…still on the…”
Thump.
Samantha dropped the phone and ran towards the staircase. She stopped beneath the mounted antlers and leaned forward. “Go away!” Samantha’s eyes were downcast, settled on the ground level where that damned post belonged. “Go away, you—”
The plain, scuffed post, the one replaced, was there at the bottom. She stared, attempting comprehension, hand resting on the banister and…
Her eyes fell onto the bulbous oil drop design. “No, no,” she said, stumbling backwards. The fine newel post was in place at the top of the stairs, fit perfectly between the banister corners, as if it had always been there. “No!”
She broke into a sprint, made for the family bathroom. It had a heavy door and a good lock. Clicked and bolted.
Thump.
Lights, blue, red, and white, flared through the octagonal bathroom window over her shoulder.
“Oh thank you, thank you,” Samantha mumbled.
Thumpbang.
The door pounded, shaking hair products and electric toothbrushes lined up around the sink like dominoes. The backs of Samantha’s knees bumped the toilet as she stumbled in reverse.
Bang. Bang.
The door splintered. Samantha looked to the window and then shifted her eyes onto the door again.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The door handle popped and fell. Samantha turned and pushed at the window glass.
Bang. Bang. Creak.
The door was open, had to be.
Samantha cried out, “Here! Here!” as she climbed through the window.
“Oh geez,” one of the four cops by the two cruisers said.
Thump. Thump.
On her heels, bumping along the linoleum. So damned close.
Thump.
“Help me!” she screamed and pushed her body out further.
“Don’t do it!” another cop shouted, her hands waving.
Thump. Knock.
Wood on porcelain, that had to be it. The newel post was there right under her feet.
“Please, it’s here! It’s getting me!” Samantha wailed, pulling further out the window, peering down into the dark forty-five feet between her and the rocky flowerbeds.
Knock. Knock.
“Lady, hold up. We’re coming in.”
Knock.
Samantha leaned and teetered. The words SAVE ME flashed bold and white hot before her eyes as she was falling.
—
Twenty-six bones. Samantha had casts on her arms, legs, and chest. This left her in a sturdy sideways U shape. She had a brace around her neck. Morphine numbed. Coherent despite the fog, she looked around as Nathan and Ella rolled her back to Coyote House.
She’d told everything. Frowning doctors gave her drugs to even things out. Her family looked at her like she was nuts. And maybe she was.
“Jane, we’re home,” Nathan said as he pushed Samantha’s wheelchair. Ella walked in reverse, minding her mother’s feet, as every bump felt like a car wreck.
Samantha was sullen and removed. For days she’d tried to hold out, but rationality oozed from every word spoken to her. The newel post was just a newel post and stress had triggered something that built on the horrible coincidences around her. Nothing more.
It was good to be home.
“Jane?” The chair bounced over the steel lip that covered the separation of rug and stone by the doorway. Samantha winced and Nathan stopped. “Sorry.”
“You okay, Mom?” Ella leaned in with an apologetic smile.
Samantha’s lower lip trembled and a scream crept up her throat as she looked past Ella to the staircase. Jane sat on the bottom step, her tongue extended to the newel post.
XX